Killing Our Children and Our Future

Parents are once again identifying the bullet-ridden bodies of their
children, while the typical firestorm of debate on gun policies and
finger pointing on who is to blame dominates our national discussion. In
the backdrop of these recurring debates are the vignettes of the young
people lost, the promise of their lives extinguished in a brutal
heartbeat, and the brave teachers and school staff who tried to protect
their students. This time, however, I find myself thinking more about
the parents of the murdered children.

The mothers and fathers who lost sons and daughters at Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., are experiencing the
most difficult and unnatural thing we do as humans – walk our children
to the grave. I have a special empathy with the Parkland parents. I have
experienced the private agony of standing over a dead daughter’s body. I
know the feelings of helplessness, the visceral sense of the unfairness
of life, and the nagging doubt in the power of goodness, hope and
ultimate purpose. I have experienced the anger you feel towards God, the
universe, or however you understand the structure of reality, and the
burning desire to take your anger out on someone or something that is
responsible. I know the collateral damage of a child’s death: the
multiple challenges occurring long after the funeral service and the way
these test a parent’s ability to respond to these stresses and a
sibling’s ability to cope. More importantly, I know that a “normal life”
is something you watch as a bystander for a very long time, with a
growing awareness that normal will no longer mean what it once did. To
watch the dancing light of playfulness in my daughter’s eyes
extinguished, and her infectious laugh silenced, is the most difficult
thing I’ve ever endured in a very long list of challenges in my life.
But, it could have been much worse.

The
difference between my experience and the parents in Parkland is that
the young dead body I looked over occurred after Sandi died of
complications of a congenital heart condition. I find it unfathomable to
imagine standing over her body on a hospital gurney, her young, tender
flesh disfigured and mutilated by high-velocity bullets. Her once
emotionally vibrant face frozen in an expression of terror. I cannot
imagine how I would have made sense of her life or mine with the
realization that her future had been stolen not so much by a mentally
ill man. But, rather by a society that had been tone deaf for decades to
its primary obligation to protect its children and to a parade of
willfully negligent politicians. After a child’s death, you feel guilty
about lots of things, but I think the most difficult thing for me to
assimilate would have been my own tardiness in realizing that America’s
approach to firearm ownership is a national health crisis and we can no
longer protect our children without changes in our gun laws.

According to the Center for Disease Control, between 1999 and 2014,
497,632 citizens of the United States lost their lives at the barrel of a
gun. This eclipses the number of deaths reported by the U.S. Dept. of
Veterans Affairs for World War I (116,516) and World War II (405,399).
Between 2012 and 2014, emergency rooms in the nation treated 5,790
children for a gun-related injury, with 1,297 dying. It is now estimated
that 19 children a day are treated in ERs for gunshot wounds. We stand
alone with these figures. Almost 91% of the young people killed by guns
in the 23 highest-income countries in the world are from the U.S. We
have the singular global distinction of allowing more of our children to
die violently by guns than any comparable country. In a nation with a
history of believing in American exceptionalism, this is a record that
should elicit shame in all of us and elicit a social revolution. Yet,
some of us, like Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association, believe access to more guns and voting out of office anyone who questions that strategy are the real solution.

The
issues surrounding guns and gun ownership are complicated, but
suggesting that personal access to high-velocity, rapid-fire weapons
made for war is not the immediate cause of catastrophic deaths in our
children’s schools is way beyond absurd.

What will history say about this time in America’s life, a time in
which an insufficient number of American parents and politicians felt
motivated to demand a change in policy in order to protect our children?
How can so many of us who are parents and voters attend candlelight
services, read stories of the horrific details, and share comments of
sadness and disgust at our water coolers and on our Facebook pages, but
then settle back so quickly into the “normal” rhythm of our lives?
Perhaps we need images to convince us, like radiologist Helen Sher’s
metaphor of what she saw in doing a CT scan on one of the Parkland
victims.

The Atlantic recently issued an article by Sher, who works
in a Florida trauma center and has treated thousands of patients wounded
by handguns. Sher recounts her horror at looking at the CT scan of a
vital organ in the body of one of the critically wounded Marjory
Stoneman Douglas High School students hit by a bullet from Nikolas
Cruz’s military grade AR-15. The radiologist said, the damaged organ
“looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer.” When a trauma
surgeon opened a similarly wounded patient in an emergency surgery,
Sher added, there was nothing left to repair – the major organ had
disintegrated and the trauma team stood by helplessly as the teenager
bled to death.

The gruesome metaphor of a smashed melon suggests the inconceivably
horrendous image the Parkland parents probably saw in their
identification of the bodies of their children. I am somewhat overcome
with empathy.

More
than a few people are now calling for the publication of the gruesome
images of gunshot victims to awaken public rage, much as Emmett Till’s mother
decided to hold an open casket wake in Chicago for her son after he had
been brutally beaten and murdered in 1955. Mamie Till, a hard-working
single parent, grudgingly allowed her only child to go to visit
relatives in Jim Crow Mississippi. The young 14-year-old Emmett was
accused of making a pass at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, and was
later kidnapped, beat, shot in the head and thrown in a river with a
heavy object tied around his neck with barbed wire. Although the men
killing Emmett were caught, they never served time, and the woman
allegedly offended by the boy later recanted her charges that the
youngster had done anything. Mamie Till wanted the world to see the
ugliness of racism and the violence of Jim Crow, and so she somehow
found the courage to display to the world Emmett’s bloated, distorted,
and unrecognizable face. Publicized images of the boy laid out in his
casket and his story are credited with helping to mobilize the Civil
Rights movement. According to Louis Beauchamp, the director of the
documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” Martin Luther
King, Jr., decided to take leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in
part, because of Emmett Till.

I’m not sure gruesome photographs of young dead bodies will move our
nation to action like it once did. We’ve had decades of video games and
realistic cinematic images of violence to de-sensitize us, and we are so
divided as a people in our assessment of fundamental issues that such a
“shock strategy” may even harden positions on both sides, rather than
open us up to a common cause. But, there are lots of other images in
this debate that might shake the U.S. out of its moral slumber in
relation to guns.

Parents losing children in Parkland are already giving interviews,
speaking at town halls and joining thousands of other gun law activists
in organizations created by people who have lost loved ones to gun
violence, such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Sandy Hook Promise, Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence, and Everytown for Safety.
The Parkland moms and dads are becoming some of the nation’s most
impassioned advocates for gun control laws for lots of reasons. And, if
the image of parents in grief arguing passionately for changes in gun
laws despite a dull-hearted political system is not enough, the students
at Marjory Stoneman Douglas are trying to launch a national movement
reminiscent of the Birmingham Children’s March in 1963, a pivotal
movement in civil rights when the news media captured images of children
huddled against fire hoses and attacked by dogs set loose by law
enforcement officers.

The
Parkland activists will conduct a national school walk out on March 14,
one month after the Parkland shooting, and another one on April 20, the
19th anniversary of the Columbine murders. In the meantime,
we have the images of articulate and resolute adolescents on common
sense gun control, like Parkland students Emma Gonzalez, Delaney Tarr, and Cameron Kasky, or aspiring journalist David Hogg,
debating intelligently and insistently about their right to a future
and their refusal to allow the culture to move on to another crisis
until gun laws change.

The sensible gun law movement has not had a major legislative win, yet. But, grassroots organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers
have demonstrated that it is possible to change the laws and culture,
despite political inertia and powerful lobby groups capitalizing on the
inability of citizens to mobilize around common sense change. Mamie
Till, a deeply religious woman, reached beyond her inconsolable loss to
see her son’s murder as an opportunity for change, not just a cause for
grief. She lived to see Emmett’s death ignite a new kind of energy in
the civil rights movement – parents, particularly mothers, galvanized to
demand change in society until children no longer had to live in fear,
and complacent politicians and voters moved to create a different kind
of society. Such is the power of an image.

Let’s hope and pray we see such forces of change again. But, let’s
remember we need to move beyond compassion and sorrow to solidarity with
those demanding political action.